LA-based wackstered nuevo boho brainstorming poets on a commission rankle fervor with their poetry play-by-plays. They fly by night. S.A. Griffin, Doug Knott, Mike Bruner, Mike Mollett, and Scott Wannberg -- anti-heroes of the anti-Christic anti-freeze anti-anti antics. Danger site burps poetic.
Jim Carroll is a great poet and his Web site and fanzine listserv under the direction of Cassie Carter is homey and chockfull. A truth-teller and wordshaper of excellence: you love
Basketball Diaries; search for
Living at the Movies.
Three poems by this most beloved old man of contemporary American poetry are at the AAP site: “Letter to Denise,” “Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey” and “Endnote.” There are also
two interviews with the poet himself in the Spring 1997
Writers Online.
The best place to find Lorna Dee’s poems & musings on the Net is at
her blog, where she “opens her poetry into pixels - poetry, peace y xicanisma.”
Chaffin’s book is called
Elementary, he edits one of the best Web zines,
The Melic Review, & you can read his poems in places like
interface &
Tryst, where the poems come with an extensive interview & an essay, “Towards a New Direction in Poetry.”
An early exemplar of the Romantic poet (
his biography includes childhood poverty & extravagant dreams, a faked suicide note, poems passed off as the work of a 15th century monk & the emblematic starving poet's garret), Chatterton committed suicide at 17, but is still remembered.
Generally revered as the first great poet of the English language, Chaucer has stymied generations of students intimidated by his 14th century Middle English -- the trick is to read it aloud.
Harvard’s Chaucer site offers glossed texts & a great library of source materials, collected for their courses but available to everybody on the Net.
Martha Cinader’s
Cinasphere Web site is a decahedron dynamo, just as she herself is. Poet, author of
When the Body Calls. Publisher & editor of
Planet Authority. She’s also motivating the earwaves with her jazz poetry foursome
Po’azz Yo’azz. Go, Martha, inflammatory incendiary Cinader!
Briefly famous as “the Green Man,” Clare spent his last years in the insane asylum, “unfit for society after years addicted to poetical prosings,” & is now known as “the forgotten Romantic.” But Simon Kovesi at Oxford Brookes University has
a site devoted to him &
a selection of his poems is in the University of Toronto’s
Representative Poetry On-Line.
There is an ever-expanding library of John Clare’s poems at this English blog site -- lovely use of the blog format to create a searchable archive of one poet’s work.
Jim Clark writes about Appalachia in poetry & song & has two books:
Dancing on Canaan's Ruins (Eternal Delight Productions, 1997) &
Handiwork (Saint Andrews Press, 1998). Hey, the guy had a poem printed in
Rolling Stone!
You can find unpublished work supplied by Cohen himself in the “
Blackening Pages,” as well as countless other Cohen poems, songs, films, paintings, photos, chats, tour reports & memorabilia, all at
The Leonard Cohen Files, an amazingly comprehensive site from Jarkko & Rauli Arjatsalo in Finland.
She is High Priestess of Poetry, her work a hypnotic blend of form and magic (...and we never use the word “magic”). Four of her “
American Sonnets” are online at
Light & Dust.
The University of Virginia’s British poetry e-archive has the text of STC’s poems, indexed every which way, for those times when you want to quote “Kubla Khan.” Plus
a dictionary to help you interpret the 200-year-old English & other foreign-language expressions in his poems &
a Coleridge timeline, with links.
Many of Coleridge’s poems are online at the University of Toronto, where you can also find the great Victorian critic
Walter Pater’s essay on him.
Someone, oh it was the
New York Times, called him the “most popular poet in America” a a few years back, there was
a huge industry to-do about his dealings with the wrong side of the independents, Random House v. Pittsburgh Press, and he was the U.S. Poet Laureate 2001 - 2003. Read the poetry, audio and literal, at
his own site.
Cid Corman was a beloved & amazingly prolific poet, translator of French & Japanese poets, host of the first American poetry radio show, respected essayist and the independent editor & founder of Origin Press, which published a great deal of the most important new American poetry from the 1950s on. He lived in Kyoto, Japan with his wife Shizumi from 1958 until his death in 2004.
A remembrance of the death of poet Hart Crane, who was only 33 when he committed suicide by jumping off a ship in 1932.
Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) was a leading light in several of the avant-gardes of the latter half of the 20th century, from Black Mountain to Beat & beyond. He was a poet of short lines, hard nouns & pure emotion, an influential teacher, editor & publisher.
